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DISCONNECTINGTHEDOTS: The weirdness continues. It always does. In the wake of Elliot Rodger’s bloody man-child meltdown in Isla Vista, the coulda-woulda-shouldas continue to flood in with such volume that Noah has been forced out of retirement and is now getting the ark shipshape and seaworthy. As expected, many questions abound. Why weren’t any of the deputies who showed up at Rodger’s now infamous Abode of Anguish on April 30 the recipients of extra mental-health training available to interested deputies? Why weren’t any county mental-health experts taken along for the now famous April 30 welfare check to help better assess an individual who in hindsight clearly spent a short lifetime baffling all the many mental-health experts who’d checked under his hood to see what made him tick-tock?

Angry Poodle

And the big one, of course, remains why didn’t the six law enforcement personnel ​— ​two separate groups, it turns out, who all arrived by foot ​— ​conduct a Department of Justice background check to see if Rodger had any registered firearms, which they do as a matter of course and self-preservation when rolling up on a domestic-dispute-in-progress call? He, as we all now know, owned three legally purchased and registered semiautomatic handguns and was at that time stockpiling enough ammo clips for the Zombie Apocalypse. At that time, authorities knew he’d been in one fight serious enough to require a visit to Cottage Hospital; they also knew he probably instigated it. They also knew he’d had a roommate arrested for “stealing” three candles worth $22. That’s weird shit. But kids in Isla Vista do crazy stuff. Increasingly, it’s part of the job description. And Rodger, we are told, presented very well. He was not hearing voices and ranting. Instead, he was famously shy and timid. The deputies put him on the phone with his mother ​— ​who spoke to county mental-health workers earlier that night. She, reportedly, was satisfied.

Two weeks after the fact, Rodger has conjured forth a hurricane of solutions desperately in search of problems that even more desperately need fixing. The trouble is that Rodger eludes them all.

It’s obviously true that so long as emotionally disturbed 22-year-olds can get their mitts on guns-n-ammo more easily than they can obtain mental-health treatment, such massacres will occur with such monotonous regularity that they become mundane. In some ways, they already have. Say what you will about the quality of treatment Rodger received, but there’s no doubt he was subjected to an enormous quantity. By the time he was refusing to take the antipsychotic medication prescribed by his celebrity shrink ​— ​a regular on the have-you-hugged-yourself-today TV talk-show circuit ​— ​Rodger had seen an entire Yellow Pages’ worth of therapists, counselors, and other practitioners of the psychological healing arts.

As a mentally ill adult, Rodger qualified as the proverbial horse you could lead to water but not make drink. The good news here is the possibility that Santa Barbara County will soon revisit a hitherto unpopular mental-health option known as Laura’s Law ​— ​named after a young woman shot to death in a serial shooting spree by a mentally ill man enraged his psychiatrist hadn’t returned multiple calls ​— ​which allows judges in participating counties to “order” service-resistant individuals suffering from mental illness to sign up for outpatient treatment and stick with the programs. Several times over the past 10 years, the county has considered Laura’s Law but declined to opt in because no dollars and cents were provided. With the blood in Isla Vista still moist, maybe the county supes will reconsider. The good news here is that there is now money available to help pay for all the treatment involved thanks to a bill passed last year by State Senate leader Darrell Steinberg. That bill allows participating counties to tap into the funds generated by Prop. 63, the 2004 statewide ballot initiative that imposed additional taxes on the richest one percent to pay for new mental-health services. Some mental-health advocates angrily object that Steinberg’s bill amounts to robbing Peter to pay Paul; Prop. 63, they correctly point out, was designed to provide new services, not secure existing ones. When asked why he robbed banks, Willie Sutton, the notoriously lovable bank robber, famously replied, “because that’s where the money is.” Sorry, Peter, but this is a stickup.

The good news, at least where funding is concerned, is that county mental health has just landed an $11 million grant that will help restore many of the services and positions they’ve been forced to cut in recent years. That will go a long way to expanding the department’s crisis-intervention capacity. That’s seriously positive.

The bad news, as Sergeant Riley Harwood of the Santa Barbara Police Department put it, is “Where you going to put them?” The “them” to which he refers are known colloquially as 5150s, meaning they’ve been deemed an imminent threat to themselves or others or so gravely mentally ill they can no longer care for themselves. Harwood suggested that even if the deputies conducting the welfare check on Rodger had been accompanied by a card-carrying psychiatrist and psychologist ​— ​and they deemed him 5150 ​— ​there wouldn’t have been any place to put him.

For the past 30 years, grand jury after grand jury has been loudly lamenting the acute shortage of acute-psychiatric-care beds in the county’s Psychiatric Health Facility, otherwise known as “County Puff.” When first built, it was designed to hold 25. But state licensing restrictions limited the actual capacity of the place to 16. Leslie Lundt, who now runs the Puff unit, says for a county our size, we need at least 40 beds, possibly as many as 70.

The really bad news is that since May 1, County Puff has been operating with a maximum capacity of only 12.

12?!

That’s right, 12.

It turns out there are new rules and regulations that require greater staffing requirements than County Puff has been able to meet, at least in the short term. Grossly simplified, the Puff Unit needs at least three certified Registered Nurses on the floor at any given time, and right now they can only field a team of two. I am told they are working on it and that this shortage will be quickly addressed. But in the meantime, Santa Barbara County is forced to ship even more of its severely mentally ill to points elsewhere. Not only does this make it harder for family and friends to offer what support they can ​— ​it’s far more expensive to pay for.

While the supply of Puff beds is going down, demand, it turns out, is increasing. In the month of May, county mental-health experts conducted 206 mental-health 5150 evaluations on the South Coast. In a typical month, that number hovers between 120 and 140. About 50 percent wind up being deemed 5150, at which point they’re checked into one of Cottage Hospital’s ER rooms to be deemed physically ready for takeoff. The last I heard, Cottage was averaging about 41 5150 holds a month, and some of these took up to four days to clear. At its worst, up to 10 ER rooms have been occupied by 5150 holds at any given time.

But even if the Puff Unit had 70 beds, there’s little guarantee the Rodger tragedy would have been averted. Every deck of cards comes equipped with two jokers. Rodger, it appears, was one.

Then there’s the hair-on-fire futility that comes from even mentioning gun control. The question remains how someone like Rodger legally obtained three guns in a state with the strictest background-check rules in the nation. Last year, the state Department of Justice denied nearly 5,000 gun-ownership applications for cause and delayed another 7,000. But it also green-lighted the sale of about 600,000 more. But the fact is unless Rodger had been declared an imminent threat to himself or others, there was no cause to say no. Likewise, I guess, with UCSB student and I.V. resident Kevin Tym, who last week nearly killed a neighbor of his “playing with” one of his seven handguns ​— ​which he kept company with 1,000 rounds of ammo ​— ​and it accidentally discharged.

With customary bombastic restraint, Assemblymember Das Williams has jumped in to fill the void by introducing a bill that would “prevent mass killings.” Hyperbole aside, the bill ​— ​germinating in the offices of Assemblymember Nancy Skinner ​— ​would constructively nibble away at the edges of the problem. If passed, the measure would allow family members and mental-health professionals to seek restraining orders against those deemed too volatile, with a propensity for violent behavior, from legally buying guns. Such restraining orders would be filed with the Department of Justice database. Not only could it red-flag attempted purchases, but it would also red-flag previous purchases, empowering authorities to seize firearms already bought. As proposed, this action could be initiated by interested parties ​— ​like parents of adult kids ​— ​or the local gendarmes. A judge would have to be convinced. And the affected party would be able to appeal, but only two weeks after the fact.

The National Rifle Association (NRA), naturally, has dismissed this as a “knee-jerk response,” though in fact, it’s been simmering in the legislative hopper the past 14 months in the wake of the Connecticut schoolyard shootings. Rodger’s rampage, however, provided an all-but-irresistible invitation to take it public. At the last minute, Williams and Skinner found an existing bill initially designed to promote alternative energy, gutted it, and replaced its contents with the new language expanding the restraining-order opportunities to block gun sales. Given that Rodger used two machetes, a knife, and a hammer to kill all three of his roommates multiple times over, I am surprised the NRA hasn’t trotted out their newest trope ​— ​or is it meme ​— ​that hammers kill more Americans every year than do guns. As a masterpiece of bad-faith sophistry, this argument is so ingeniously disingenuous I almost have to admire its audacity. Almost. In 2011, it turns out, the FBI reported that 496 Americans were killed by hammers, clubs, or other ill-defined instruments of blunt-force trauma. That same year, 323 Americans were killed by rifles. Two points: First, we don’t know exactly how many people hammers actually killed. But of the 32,000 people killed annually by firearms, 11,000 bit the dust because of handguns, not rifles. Of those, 6,371 were homicides and 4,600 were suicide. You do the math. Nothing adds up.

Lastly, there is Isla Vista, a bastard stepchild of a town disowned and disinherited by any and all responsible parties. Two riots in five months. Two gang rapes. I don’t know … maybe somebody should do something. Last year, a friend of my son’s was nearly choked to death in I.V. by some psycho looking to garrote women with his belt. She barely escaped. Not long after, he was at an I.V. party where some forcibly uninvited guests forcibly invited themselves back by brandishing a couple of nasty-looking firearms. There’s no better way to accessorize these days than with a Glock. They go with any wardrobe. The mass murder has also sparked an overdue outpouring of outrage about the culture of misogyny long festering in Isla Vista. (See Kelsey Brugger’s article here). Though hardly unique to I.V., it needs serious attention. Sexism is not just politically incorrect; it’s deadly. Scientists have just discovered more people are killed by hurricanes with female names than with male names. Why? Because people don’t take hurricanes with female names as seriously as they do male-named disasters and don’t respond as urgently as they should.

Like the nightmare it’s been, perhaps the only sense that can be made is that which we impose. Maybe it’s as simple as this: Every deck of cards comes with two jokers, and Elliot Rodger was one of them. If that’s the case, maybe we should change the rules before someone deals out Joker Number Two.

Comments

good piece on a horribly disturbing tragedy... I served my 8 years living in I.V. and loved most of it...but that was in the 70s and when I visit out there it's clearly different. The tendency toward gender-bashing has caused an over-emphasis on misogyny as the single cause, but that is too simplistic, although it played a part. The misogyny in IV is rampant and awful, and sexism in any direction can be deadly. But see Meghan Daum's excellent column on this http://touch.latimes.com/#section/527... Enough of Das Williams's baloney, & Nick nails him with sarcasm: "With customary bombastic restraint, Assemblymember Das Williams has jumped in to fill the void by introducing a bill that would 'prevent mass killings.' " Let's make guns even harder to get in Calif., it would be helpful to tighten up our State laws more - work on that Das, eh? How many others in IV (or SB for that matter) are like Kevin Tym with his 7 guns, 1000 rounds, AND LACK OF ANY TRAINING in weapons??

A lot of people are criticizing "the system" but with all the mentally unbalanced people in the Santa Barbara area, how can they possibly keep track of them all?

Try calling the cops on a medium-level complaint, and most of the time they will take forever to respond. Why is this?...because the ratio of complaints far exceed their ability to be everywhere. Do we need more cops?...or do we need to stop producing and incubating the mental illness that accompanies mass killings.

One more thing: Why is that only when "one of us" or in this case six of "us" gets killed, that the media, bloggers, and politicians shed tears and show outrage while they couldn't care less when Blacks and Mexicans die in urban squabbles? The racism and hypocrisy is sickening.

@ Nick Welsh, since California is so Gun Banned (except for the Mentally ill, Criminals, and Gang Bangers), maybe the rest of us who are deprived of personal protection should invest in Defensive Training and Protection Equipment, here are a few sites to obtain some sort of protection from those who are armed and dangerous;http://www.galls.com/body-armorhttp://www.uscav.com/category.aspx?ca...http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_trksi...I have used Body Armor for work for the last 18 years and it works perfectly in surviving an armed conflict, especially the Face Armor since crazies are using headshot's to put people down faster than ever before.

I guess Edie Sedgwick actually died in Santa Barbara, where, actually, Charles Manson lived (address on his last driver's license was in Santa Barbara). But I'll bet in popular memory, everybody associates them both with Isla Vista.

And those privileged young preppies who murdered homeless in parks? That was Isla Vista too, right?

Nick wrote, ``Lastly, there is Isla Vista, a bastard stepchild of a town disowned and disinherited by any and all responsible parties. ''

OK, maybe it is irony, but more likely Nick is so far off base he has embarrassed himself. 10 years of weekly meetings by rather responsible folks to work out the Isla Vista Master Plan totally ignored. The whole loop rebuilt. A rather good Isla Vista Elementary School. Huge efforts in the IV Youth Projects.

good article. One thing left out - the parents of Elliot Rodger's never called the SB Sheriff's office according to a press statement it released. The therapist called after he saw this event in the media - he knew about the threat 45 minutes before this. The therapist and the family thought they could handle this on the down low that is why LiChin and Peter drove to IV.

this is the status quo, it has been for decades now. last year there was a mass shooting for every day of the year (an incident in which 4 or more people were shot at one time). CA, with the strictest gun laws, forced elliot to acquire his handguns over an extended period of time (there's a 30 day waiting period between purchases) and yet no red flags were raised. the regulatory system is a complete failure but the lobby won't allow us to address its shortcomings. no person taking psychoactive pharmaceuticals or in the care of mental health professionals should EVER be allowed to own a gun. period. it's the common thread in every single homicidal shooting spree we've had over the past decade.

I don't get it, are cops not even allowed to "ask" to search a premise anymore. I know its double edge sword given that your damned if you do let them in and you have a stash of guns and damned if you don't let cops in because it could raise suspicions that you're hiding something. I know my response would be "go get a warrant if you think you have probable cause" but its easy for me to stick up for my rights given the fact that I don't purposefully break the law. Now its in my head if I'm ever in the position where a cop "asks" to search my premises I will certainly say "You want to search my home without a warrant, but you didn't even "ask" to search mass murder Elliot Rodgers apartment when you had a chance? you must be kidding.

Nick wrote:"Laura’s Law ​…which allows judges in participating counties to “order” service-resistant individuals suffering from mental illness to sign up for outpatient treatment and stick with the programs…"

Which programs? The ones in which psychiatrists being paid $180,000 per year of our tax dollars spend five minutes with a client and dispense dangerous neurotoxins that actually CAUSE these horrendous outbreaks of violence rather than prevent them, produced by transnational pharmaceutical corporations, 80% of which are criminal organizations, according to the New England Journal of Medicine (see link below)?

Nick also wrote:"... You do the math. Nothing adds up."

Guns in the hands of 100 million law-abiding US citizens protect from criminals up to 2.5 million citizens per year — usually without firing a shot, so it doesn't make "the news," unlike the 100 or so annual fatalities from mass shootings. For his total picture, Nick's relying on mentally ill people [ http://www.gunlaws.com/Hoplophobia-Gu... ] , corrupt, hypocritical, and clueless politicians, and local "gun control" groups whose patron saint, believe it or not, is the megalomaniac oligarch Michael "the NYPD is my ARMY" Bloomberg.

I'm fed up with these control freak tyrants, pushing for citizen disarmament, first in the guise of "gun control", and now, since that didn't work, "gun safety" and "gun reform" — while their astroturf "moms," their corrupt elite politicians, and the oligarchs who provide them with the money to scare everybody nearly witless with their lies travel in armored vehicles surrounded by armed bodyguards.

Though I've never owned a firearm, I've been listening to political hacks lying, deceiving, and spinning nonsense for at least 38 years, since the head of "the Brady Bunch" revealed their real agenda to the New Yorker (click link below) in 1976.

I covered all this in a piece posted at the 'Santa Barbara Progressive Coalition' three days ago, which I can't reproduce here, as it includes 12 images, dozens of articles that Nick at least needs to read *the titles of*, from highly regarded sources such as the Harvard School of Law and Public Policy and the Pew Research Center, and several short videos, one of which is a clip of one of the most corrupt members of the US congress, Dianne Feinstein, a hypocrite with her own concealed carry permit and surrounded by armed guards everywhere she goes, spewing 37 seconds of treasonous rubbish on national television:

Be sure to click the bottom link there for the first part ('2nd Amendment (#1): bad news for California criminals'), just above a four-panel cartoon that encapsulates the response that the mass media and criminal drug dealers (i.e. pharmaceutical companies) wants to elicit from us to the Isla Vista tragedy.

I posted links to three reports in the first three comments at the link above, and also, in the third comment, I referenced the first comment at another recent Santa Barbara Independent piece on the tragedy...

...that illustrates how the dying mass media (now controlled by just six transnational corporations) hypes these tragedies in order to encourage copycat crimes — which ups their ratings which garners them more millions from the criminal pharmaceutical companies.

"We've had 20 years of mass murders, throughout which I have told CNN and other mass media: If you don't want to propagate more mass murders, don't start the story with sirens blaring…don't have photographs of the killer…don't make this 24/7 coverage…DO localize this story to the affected community, and make it as boring as possible in every other market — because every time we have intense saturation coverage of a mass murder, we expect to see one or two more within a week."

Partial solution: require HIPAA release from anyone attempting to buy a gun and then with that authorization do a mental health check as part of the process. Simple. History of mental health treatment = no (legal) purchase.

Leave it to Nick to write the best articles of all the worldwide torrent of words attempting to explain the inexplicable. Do we need any more proof that we are fortunate to have such a journalist in our community?

We can all nibble around what caused Rodger's rampage. We can blame mental illness, guns, knives and 2 door black BMWs. The fact of the matter is that it was Rodger's antisocial behavior that caused so much suffering. He wasn't mentally ill. That is why the mental health system failed him. He was a spoiled brat and needed to be socialized so that he would become a responsible adult. But all the pathologizing of Rodger got in the way of the socializing he desperately needed.

To call this spoiled brat mentally ill is offensive and a disservice to those who truly suffer from a mental illness.

sbkid wrote:"…is offensive and a disservice to those who truly suffer from a mental illness."

Thank you for that.

And notice, all the bloviating from the elite and/or corrupt politicians (usually both), a**holes who are just out for their photo ops and to heap more bad laws upon their heaping, steaming piles of bad laws; how about this law: you scum need to repeal ten laws you've PASSED AGAINST US for every new law you introduce……where was I…..oh ;-) …

…they're not talking about mental health TREATMENT, rather how can we classify more people mentally ill in order to grab their guns.

Yes, they're all about "saving the children" — these are the same a**holes who allow the scumsucking psychiatric industry to make up new diseases so they can get their kickbacks from drugging up 5 year-olds for fidgeting from being forced to sit at a desk most of the day.

And what about the 175,000 veterans who have ALREADY had their gun rights seized for seeking treatment for mild depression?

And then there's the new diagnosis (I don't recall the name and I'm too annoyed — ;-0 — to look it up right now) that now classifies anyone not completely compliant to authority to be mentally ill.

Can anyone of us hoi polloi with a room temperature IQ or better not see where this is going, in a country run by psychopaths that has brutally initiated armed conflict against 201 countries since the end of World War II, every single one a violation of the Nuremberg Principles? :

[I've got a citation for that somewhere in all this linked up mess if anyone wants to look (LOL)...

We're all mentally ill, and no one gets to exercise their right to protect themselves (that these a**holes don't have the right to take away — someone should require an IQ test and a test on the US and California constitutions to determine whether they understand that the Bill of Rights is a list of rights these goons don't get to take, not a list of privileges they can take away whenever megalomaniac oligarchs such as Michael "the NYPD is my ARMY" Bloomberg grease their palms with enough money to do it).

Speaking of that POS: Here's an exact quote from Bloomie:

"I am telling you if there is a god, when I get to heaven I’m not stopping to be interviewed. I am heading straight in. I have earned my place in heaven. It’s not even close."

If this country was not in the hands of psychopaths sucking up more than 60% of our financial resources to brutally attack countries on the other side of the planet that did not attack us and that posed no threat to us, murdering an average of 350,000 - 500,000 men, women, and children per year (and maiming and driving from their homes a far greater number) — then:

(1) we'd have much less mental distress

and

(2) we'd have a massive amount of financial resources to take care of those of us who needed taking care of, in a far better way than drugging them up with neurotoxins produced by transnational criminal corporations

According to another reliable local internet news source. The Man-Child had not been taking classes at SBCC since 2011. The man-child had no employment that I have read of. Someone was paying the monthly bills and funded that BMW, which was enabling a sick person to get sicker.

Were the bills paid directly by the man-child, money put in his checking account or was he using a supplied debit/credit card. I looked up a Sig P226 of which he had two and the Glock. Cheapest Sig 226 I found was $1100.00. How were these items funded? Who saw the bills?

So this sick man-child was awash in expensive items paid for by whom?

Someone was enabling a lifestyle and not monitoring the results.

When my kid was in college, with a used car, I got a report each semester so I could get a good student discount on their auto insurance, I knew if they were in school. If they quit school or failed to get good grades they were on their own with no further financial assistance.

Tough Love may not be PC but it usually produces good results.

The parents are not off my hook until much more is known about the $$$ that enabled the negative lifestyle of the man-child.

Uh, seems to me from readying some of these posts, quite a few of you might be candidates...

Interesting that Nick completely omitted HOW we got to this place. It started with Reagan blowing up the mental health system in the US during his presidency 30 years ago. Until someone re-builds that mental health infrastructure, we're going to keep seeing mentally-ill people (some of whom are dangerous) in our communities.

"If passed, the measure would allow family members and mental-health professionals to seek restraining orders against those deemed too volatile, with a propensity for violent behavior, from legally buying guns"

The bill has good points BUT needs revision, to enable the correct people to apply for the orders not just any Tom,Dick or Harry who may have a grudge against you without any recourse.

A blanket anyone or anything goes policy is not going to fly.

How about licensed mental health professionals and grandparents, parents, brother, sister, close relatives?

How about some recourse for the accused if the claim is found to be without merit or downright malicious?

Peaceful firearms owners are entitled to protections from Hoplophobes.

I'm with howgreen: the parents need to take major responsibility for this. And as a society we need to work to encourage better and more thoughtful parenting. Parenting is a life-long responsibility. Not just some cute pictures shown off on a fireplace mantle.

BC, what police officers told my school was that the "mass guys" (95% are male) need a "target rich" environment like post offices or schools, and then, see, with the bigger number of victims idiots like some of us posters will go on and on about the "video" or whatever BS the guy left behind.

This could have all been avoided had LiChin or the therapist called the cops upon receipt of the email. Instead she called her ex and drove to IV to quietly toss this piece of human garbage into the loony bin - a private one of course. See they thought the mass murder was scheduled for Sat and the therapist told them Elliot is meticulous when it comes to times and dates. But you know what they say about the plans of lice and men.

The presumption is a person like Rodger actually shows prolonged outwards appearances of "mental illness" or at least of being "mentally disturbed". Something a law enforcement officer can cue off and therefore legally do some background checks.

Is this really the case? Someone with mental health training needs to chime in.

I'm not a mental health expert, but I did see Rodger's Youtube video and wonder if a person like that can act normal enough for a short-enough amount of time to not raise anyone's suspicions .. even someone with "training".

Honestly, my first reaction when I saw Rodger's Youtube video that Friday night was, "I bet this guy can easily act normal enough to buy a gun legally". Turns out I was right.

Your link is a self-publicized document authored by you, a self-described "journalist" and looks fishy. No professional journalist would reveal the email addresses of persons involved in a murder case. None would offer opinions in a news article. But you have on both accounts.

agree Greg & Indyholio, what then-Gov Reagan did then was gut the mental hospitals, begin that PRIVATIZATION of public education {e.g. at UC = fees} that haunts us today, and Reagan also spun the wholly discredited "trickle down" blarney... it trickled UP to the 1%, but actually to the top 400 - 500 families, the upper 1/10th of the 1%. Piketty's Harv. U. Press tome shows how the rich do indeed get richer -- we needed an economist to tell us this?! Agree EB about "Someone with mental health training needs to chime in" and many have in other media...yes, with hindsight one of the 5 police should have had mental health training for cues, etc. This costs $, & we should pay for it and restrain guns even further.

DrDan: Reagan left office 40 years ago. The Democrats have had plenty of time to restore funding since then, but seem more interested in $100,000,000,000 high speed rail than dealing with the mentally ill.

When Governor, Ronnie infamously said: "If it's to be a bloodbath, let it be now. Appeasement is not the answer." This was shortly before the Kent State and Jackson State killings, in April 1970. Here we are, 44 years later, and he got his wish.

gosh BC, "4 decades" is nothing, by Thucydides' counting, 40 years was about a single "generation" -- what happened in the 70s really affects us today, Ronnie wasn't helpful, and look at Iran-Contra...

California was hampered for decades by the 2/3rds rule. That is why there are now more positive steps - steps that could not be taken earlier. Also, another excellent article on the Independent describes how many of Jerry Brown's actions now, are attempting to undo the time bombs implemented before. There is much bad economic policy heritage to reverse - made more difficult by the enormous budget problems that CA had for several many years.

DrDan: Rest assured, I'm not a Reagan cheerleader--I didn't vote for him either time, and I agree with you 100% on Iran-Contra. My point is that it's time for people to stop complaining about the past and try to make things better.

It's the drugs! Not the mental illness, unless you mean the mental illness caused by the drugs.

Who are the real perpetrators? The (possibly) over-diagnosed young (or not) people who have serious yet known adverse reactions to the over-prescribed drugs, or the ones who push these drugs, either out of ignorance, or denial ("only small percentage get these reaction")?

It is known that a small percentage of recipients of these antidepressants will react with suicidal and homicidal thoughts that sometimes, unfortunately, lead to actions.

but it's just horribly complex, Olegario, & one might say it's mental illness AND the drugs (JT here) AND the parents AND cultural misogyny AND the perils of privilege AND too much on-line time AND a decaying culture.... but in trying to understand how such a situation could develop, we still don't want to "forgive" the shooter, either. but yeah, Xanax is explosive (took it once before an MRI: never again!) and can be depressive, like most of the other SSR's (or whatever they are called: Prozac etc) When Tieber writes about the tech-media's control... e.g. "...that [it] illustrates how the dying mass media (now controlled by just six transnational corporations) hypes these tragedies in order to encourage copycat crimes " -- & therefore more ad revenue cause THEIR station leads with the most gore... This is too much, eh?